I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
(Subreddit peasants sometimes migrate to a new sub over bad mods, but the old sub usually remains, still with a healthy brand. And still with a lot of members, who (speculating) maybe don't want to possibly miss out on something in the bad old sub, or didn't know what's going on, or the drama they noticed in their feed wasn't worth their effort to do the clicks to unjoin from the sub in question.)